05. Making PEP Work and Results

Over the years our clients have used a variety of techniques to achieve benefits from effective labor management through PEP. Hopefully, some of you will share your experiences with others and include the overall results. A survey we did found average productivity gains of 16% with an additional 12% (50% shared with the employees) if incentives were implemented. Also, work quality improved 8% and merchandise turn times were reduced by 12%. How does your organization measure up?

Comments

We had no formal labor management program before PEP. Installing PEP gave us the tools we needed to fairly evaluate our employee’s productivity and work quality. Giving our employees credit for the work they performed helped us retain our best workers and made us better prepared for our highly volatile peak and valley periods. During the four years we used PEP, I feel we made tremendous improvements in productivity and were able to save a significant amount of money. We have recently been acquired by another company and are in the process of moving to their system. Hopefully we’ll be able to continue our improvement.

Our labor management program provides information we really need to help us better organize and complete our work. One of our initial findings showed that by improving productivity, we could significantly decrease our need for extra Saturday shifts. Since we had very little detailed measurement before implementing PEP, it’s difficult to know how much we improved overall productivity, but I would estimate between 15% and 20%. In addition, the program has provided SDI with data they needed to help us improve methods, update our material handling equipment and better utilize our building space.